Features

Independent writers have the opportunity of a lifetime. We are on the cusp of a revolution in breaking open the audience for our work. Millions of e-readers were opened under the tree, and all of us writers are standing on the sidelines watching and hoping and wringing our hands that our work will be chosen to be downloaded.

And we need our shit to be good. Really fucking good. Like so good, that grandma may actually break her 40-year streak in reading crime novels and read your anthology of shorts. We have this opportunity to kill the conventional publishing machine […]

You may have noticed that Self-Publishing Review has been a little less than active in the past couple of months. I’ve been running this site for two years and needed a sabbatical.

In that time, there’s been an amazing amount of activity, with people claiming left and right that self-publishing has arrived along with amazing overnight success stories – the kind that used to be few and far between. And, weirdly, this hasn’t left me feeling elated, but actually like I’m losing something. Best analogy is being into a band before they got famous and then feeling left out. This […]

Have you ever opened Facebook and not been able to post even a simple “Washed my feet today” and then looked to see successful(!) indie writers, saying clever things like “Tell about your funniest co-worker” or “What are you reading lately?” and getting 187 comments? And what’s with all the Romance writers? My suggested Friends are usually women Romance writers, who would not read and enjoy anything I’ve written, not in a million years. Why does Facebook keep throwing them at me? I’d be better off with Hooters girls, porn stars, junkies.

I am getting to hate social networking, but […]

You may have heard by now about the Kindle book, The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure, that was posted on Amazon, greeted with mass outrage, and subsequently removed by Amazon. My first thought hearing this was: Damn, self-publishing doesn’t need this.  Though with self-publishing, this kind of thing is inevitable, as self-publishers can post anything and everything they want, this doesn’t help the stigma that self-publishers are putting out the worst writing available.  There is no argument against this: of all the published work out in the world, self-published writing likely comprises the worst of it.

That […]

I thought this was an interesting way to do a book launch: The creators of some popular webcomics have a new book coming out next week called Machine of Death (a collection of short stories from a whole mess of folks), and they’re asking all their fans to buy the book on the same day in an attempt to push it to #1 in Amazon’s sales rankings.

Now, they may or may not find any lasting sales impact from their day in the sun (anyone who’s had a review or promotion push their amazon sales rank up will tell you […]

I grew up reading the likes of Uncanny Xmen, Incredible Hulk and disturbingly, Watchmen, among scores of other super hero titles. For better or worse, those comic books help shape much of my personality and imagination.

Spending six years contracting for the Department of Education, I repeatedly ran into educator innovators, centering student learning on comic books. See Columbia’s Comic Book Project for an example.

Reading comics, I absorbed massive amounts of knowledge: the basics of quantum physics, chemistry, astrology–naturally my vocabulary and word usage was improved. To boot, comic stories were my only source of highly creative drama […]